


give yourself a hand, the hand is yours

by John the Alligator (Chyronic)



Series: The Superhero AU [2]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern, Alternate Universe - Superpowers/Superheroes, Amputation, Background Arson, Gen, Hospitals, OCD, Self-Mutilation, Tezzeret's godawful sense of humor, Transhumanities for the Transhumanism God! Arms for the Arm Triumvirate, i guess?, mild police brutality references, really sincerely graphic amputation, you fucked up tezz you fucked up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 18:01:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6161858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyronic/pseuds/John%20the%20Alligator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tezzeret cleans house and divests himself of worldly possessions before throwing his lot in with the Consortium.</p>
            </blockquote>





	give yourself a hand, the hand is yours

No matter how you (ha) cut it, amputation isn’t pretty. I suppose that’s probably why most people are so squeamish around the subject.

Too bad.

A lot of the way I am doing this owes itself solely to the fact that I have the overwhelming urge to make a point, if only to myself. That’s why I’m standing in my room wearing only underwear, walking away from my life a week before I would officially obtain the doctorate I’ve spent the past five years on, about to saw off my right arm.

My real arm is elsewhere; after long consideration, I decided I couldn’t trust myself to do both halves of the operation in one go. The delicate work of threading metal through my nerves with my mind can wait. This is the brutal part.

With that in mind, I stop dithering, tighten my fingers on the edge of my desk, and jerk my arm out of its socket, hard, fast enough that I hear the wet pop-and-crunch noises before the pain hits me.

“Shit!” I shout, in an eloquent and restrained fashion. “Shit, shit, _fuck_!”

I force myself to stop and, if not relax, then at least loosen my grip on the desk. Keeping from leaning on it is hard. My instinctive reaction to the pain is to seek support, but the only helping limb I have on hand is the one hanging off my shoulder.

This is probably going to be the worst pain I experience tonight, despite being the most minor wound. Once I get my arm off, shock should set in such that the full scale of the pain doesn’t hit me. The body is much less worried about dislocation, so I can feel every element of agony the slack distance between the top of my arm and the socket of my shoulder has to offer me.

Half of my desk—the half far away from my hand—is as sterile as I could get it, empty except for the circular saw laid out on plastic sheeting. I can’t do anything about the fact that there’s inevitably dust in the air. I just can’t. I’ll have to risk it.

I made the saw myself, using school facilities and only my mind. It’s going to be a part of me soon; once I’ve gotten the arm off of me, I’ll seal the blade itself to the stump. Allowing time to swap out for something else to cap it off with would leave blood clotting under the surface, with the potential for rot I couldn’t get to, as well as surely impeding the titanium’s ability to fuse cleanly with remaining bone. This means that later I’ll have to attach another layer and pull the lines of wiring through what used to be the blade and inside the myelin until I hit undamaged nerves. That’s the hard part, I tell myself. This is easy. All I have to do is cut.

Enough, I think. Enough delaying.

My aim is off. It saws through skin and muscle, all right—and into the top of the bone of my arm, a couple inches off-course. I swear and pull it back.

This blade isn’t meant to go through bone. Next time is going to _hurt_ —not that it doesn’t already.

The second time I feel it sink into the wrong part of my soon-to-be-erstwhile arm, I force my way through the bone instead of pulling away. There are tears in my eyes, blurring my vision, and raw, red, jagged-edged pain clouding my mind. Maybe that’s why I don’t pull the blade away soon enough: I feel it glance off my ribs.

It doesn’t go hard enough to break through bone. My ribcage serves its purpose; my lungs are safe. I feel myself sob and raise the saw up into the air for a second, a pause I can’t afford to take and can’t afford not to.

One more time. Come on. One more.

And it glides through the remaining flesh like there’s Anyone to hear me, let alone care—like I’d designed it to.

It still hurts. Everything hurts. I feel like half my body is on fire. There’s too much flesh left—I need to be able to hit the bones of the shoulder—so I scrape through it again, unable to tell if I’m chipping off some bone. I focus on quickly cutting off the the edges of the circular saw, then running incisions with my mind to allow it to fold, before clamping it down on the stump and the remains of my shoulder. The metal molds tightly to the empty socket and to my torso, tight along the top of my shoulder, creased along the collarbone. Unbreakable. I hope.

I stumble towards the desk and get my left arm up on it for stability—at the cost of ending up on my knees—and grope for my phone. Remaining shoulder mobility seems decent, I note vaguely.

Dialing 911 should be added to the list of things that take an astonishing amount of focus when one is bleeding out from a severed limb. Or, hopefully, no longer bleeding out that badly; otherwise I’d need to have a word with my own past self’s design work, and that would be awkward, since I’d probably be dead. There’s not much I can do about the side wound, though. It’s shallow, I tell myself, it’ll be fine—because what other option do I have?

“911, what—”

“I need an ambulance,” I say. My voice is steadier than I’d expect and weaker than I’d like. “I’ll be—I’ll be out front.” No, wait, they need to know my address. I rattle it off on reflex; when I try to think the words through they won’t assemble in my mind. That’s probably right. Close enough.

Operator’s been trying to interrupt me. “What is your emergency, sir?”

“My arm,” I say, distantly. “I. I don’t. I don’t have it any more. I can’t stop bleeding.”

Audible intake of breath. “All right, stay where you are—”

“I’ll. Yes. I’ll be on the sidewalk.”

“No—sir? Sir! Don’t move—” I hang up and throw the phone on the floor. Burner phone. It’s fine.

Burning.

Hm.

Why does the room smell like gasoline?

Right. I figured that out already. Because I still need to torch the place.

I don’t think I’m in any condition to do that.

I blink, slowly, at the wall. Thinking is hard.

Right. I have help with that. The torching, not the thinking. But that’s nice. Novel.

I haul myself back upright somehow and find my way to the wrong exit—that is, the one no one in the building will think of, hopefully—by rote. For possibly the first time in my life, I’m grateful for carpet. It gives my blood-slick bare feet direly necessary traction.

The total time elapsed for the elevator is long enough that even in my incredibly dull state I can think, _I hope they tear out the damn carpet, bloodstains are a bitch._ Then, _Thinking this is stupid, I’m never coming back here._ And, _I don’t fucking care, I’ve lived here for three years and I hate not only the very idea of carpet but that one in particular._

Arguing with myself is an absurd practice, but I think—I fall forward, slam into the wall, oh, that’s nice, I’m glad there’s a wall there, I’m glad there are walls—I need the distraction. The pain is suffocating, but the delirium helps, puts distance between me and it. Somewhat literally: I feel like I’m floating somewhere above and behind my body. I suppose it’s too much to ask that my thought processes don’t follow suit.

It turns out I’m leaning against the elevator doors, not a wall. I discover this by somehow not falling when they open. It’s probably for the best; I think I’d just pass out otherwise, if I didn’t have to move. I stumble out onto the curb, armless, covered in blood, still wearing only underwear. As long as I’m doing something this stupid, I figure, I might as well confuse some EMTs. I hope they are well and duly confused.

I should take care to faint, I think, giggling. (Hysterical, probably.) Otherwise someone might fear for their life lest I assault them with my spectral lack of arm.

It really shouldn’t be this funny. I sit down, calmly, on the sidewalk.

“I think I’m in shock,” I say pleasantly, to nothing in particular. Nothing in particular doesn’t answer.

“I’m awfully cold,” I continue. “It’s not cold out. Blood loss, you know.”

I can hear distant sirens. Took them long enough.

“I think that went about as well as could be expected, don’t you?” I say brightly.

The empty air continues to not respond. I find myself vaguely irked by this.

I pass out before I can say anything on the subject.

On the sidewalk.

Calmly, though.

**Author's Note:**

> [Oh, just go look at the song.](http://genius.com/Andrew-bird-eyeoneye-lyrics)
> 
>  
> 
> ~~We get to plot that's not AU equivalents of canon events eventually, I promise. Alternately, for those of you playing along at home, yes, he did it himself alone in the middle of the night in canon, too. This fucking guy.~~


End file.
